One of the small articles is exemplified as a compact cylindrical container having one open end and the other closed end. Such a cylindrical container is widely used as a container for storing a liquid which is consumed in a very small amount at a time. In order to inject a predetermined amount of liquid into such a cylindrical container, a predetermined number of containers rather than individual containers are preferably dealt as a unit. For this purpose, the cylindrical containers are dealt such that a predetermined number of cylindrical containers are held on a tray. This tray has holes for storing the individual cylindrical containers in a matrix form.
In order to store the cylindrical containers into the corresponding storage holes formed in the tray, the directions of the cylindrical containers fed from a parts feeder must be aligned with each other. That is, some cylindrical containers are fed from the parts feeder such that their open ends are leading ends. Other cylindrical containers are fed from the parts feeder such that their closed ends are leading ends. In order to inject the liquid into the cylindrical containers, the individual containers must be fed toward a tray such that the closed ends are leading ends. For this reason, the cylindrical containers from the parts feeder must be supplied to an appropriate aligning unit, the axial directions of the individual containers are detected in the aligning unit, and all the containers are aligned such that their closed ends are leading ends.
The cylindrical containers having passed through the aligning unit are then stored in the holes formed in the tray. In this case, the cylindrical containers are generally stored in the corresponding storage holes one by one or in units of rows in a conventional arrangement. That is, the cylindrical containers whose axial directions are aligned with each other are fed from the aligning unit and are transferred through a guide pipe path. When the cylindrical containers are to be transferred from the guide pipe path to the holes formed in the tray, it is impossible to continuously feed the cylindrical containers to the tray by simply guiding the lower end of the guide pipe path to each storage hole of the tray. More specifically, since the cylindrical containers continue within the guide pipe path, in order to pick up each cylindrical container and feed it into a predetermined storage hole, a complicated transfer mechanism is required In addition, since the transfer mechanism is located above the tray, it is impossible to simultaneously feed the cylindrical containers into all the storage holes of the tray. Cylindrical containers can be simultaneously fed to only the storage holes of each row. In the above feeding of the cylindrical containers, the tray must be intermittently conveyed to every row of the cylindrical containers, thereby complicating a tray conveyance mechanism.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above situation, and has as its object to provide a compact small-article feed machine which can feed small articles having an aligned axial direction in an aligned state and which has a simple structure.